An increasing phenomenon in
bars and cafes across the western world, where
poor poets strut and fret about an open mic stage and spout doggerel about police brutality, their
ex-girlfriends' mothers or the last
time they got stoned. All in the same poem.
The point of a poetry slam is to shout your drivel louder than the previous contestant, while whooping your friends into a brain-dead ecstacy by throwing in staccato clusters of meaningless interior rhymes without discretion or
respect to form reflecting thematic content. You must also recite your
work breathlessly, hunched over your microphone and clutching your tofu-addled guts.
Invariably, poetry slams are populated by idiots and poems are full of sound and fury, signifying something only if you are part of the poetry slam clique.
"My girlfriend's mother, she's a bit of all right/Apart from her love for the fascist Right/I got stoned with her and I said, hey mother-babe/Wanna take a ride in my astrolabe/She fetched me a punch upside me chops/and said "Young
man, I shall call the cops"/and they arrived and said hey you'
re that twat from the Poetry Slam and they hit me
man and it was really heavy and like I had to eat non-organic baked
beans in the cell with a papier mache fork taken from a page of the Daily Mail and had to wipe my backside with a copy of Young Conservatives' Conference Special 1987 -
William Hague Edition. Wow, bummer."